whites now sorted, his socks, his shirts old egg-yolk yellow under the arms

try these to ensure resultsreward your efforts:

his underwear, the boxers faded and frayed repeating their pattern of angular hearts

be sure to remove any hooks or weights

their scattered and miniature x's and o's openings measured for admission or exit

don't overload the machine, and remember

his colors tangling in a tossed-off pile of mostly darks, mostly black and blues

fabric becomes much heavier when wet

while here and there a spring green a tremulous yellow

protect from strong sunlightand abrasive objects

a newborn pink, streak of surprisingly deep red

warning: damages may not be covered

like fresh blood, a raw and unsutured cut

try a product that claims to hidesurface scratches

to be rinsed and wrung, dried and folded and piled into the thing we call a long marriage

if the marks have darkeneduse a sharp knife

these daily removals, these many attempts to wipe clean the counter the table the slate

if the burn is deep use fillersmoothing it to match the surface

the windows now free of fingerprints and smears as if there were no glass no barrier no space

work carefully to avoiddamaging the paint

in which to revisit your own faint reflection

this coating should last for years

Reading this poem snapped me back to the early years of motherhood - perhaps because I studied a similar book by Alma Chesnut Moore in trying to gain some skill in the art of keeping house. I wasn't alone in feeling confounded by domesticity - I was surrounded by creative, educated women who were suddenly home with children, laundry, surfaces to clean, furniture to fix, order to find in the daily waves of chaos that seems to follow new parents around. To do this and anything else required a mental version of ambidexterity that I didn't possess - one mind focused on the physical and the other on the metaphysical. I was always getting the two mixed up. This is what Jennifer O'Grady captures so perfectly here - the the waves of poetic thought lapping at the shore of the endless list of domestic to-dos and how-to-dos. This poem appears in Poetry Daily and was originally published in Southwest Review. If you are reading this without having read Moths, visit that page by clicking the link to find out more about Jennifer's work and read another terrific poem. (Reprinted with permission of the author)